Encounters With Great Recordings Of The Twentieth Century, #1: Pere Ubu, "The Modern Dance" (Release date, January 1978, date of acquisition, some time around January 1978)

For Chris Wells.

Many were the times during my childhood and adolescence when, due to my consumption and enjoyment of certain particular pieces of popular or, I should more accurately say, in some cases, semi-popular music, my parents were forced to conclude that I had gone completely off the rails, and/or was gay. Listening to the Beatles' "Within You, Without You" on some kinda outdoor hi-fi setup over in a corner of the backyard one summer night in '67, I overheard one of the adults hanging out with my folks at the patio proper exclaim, "Sounds like Chinese funeral music," and saw my mom kind of shrug and roll her eyes and make this "what are we gonna do?" gesture. One afternoon a few years later, I brought home a copy of David Bowie's Aladdin Sane, which my mom politely requested to take a gander at; and when she opened the gatefold sleeve (see right) and got a load of the air-brushing at Bowie's crotch cleavage, she had her very first stroke.

But it was when I first played Pere Ubu's debut LP, The Modern Dance, on the Radio Shack stereo system of my family's home in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, some time in the winter of early 1978, that the determination was made by certain of my kin that I had finally and definitively lost my mind for good.

It was an album whose prospect I found highly intriguing, despite being rather suspect of the album's front cover artwork, which didn't look particularly punk rock or even post punk rock to me, as in, what's with the dude in the ballet slippers. I had not heard the Cleveland, Ohio-based bands independently released singles but I knew their work was rated highly by Robert Christgau, whose Consumer Guide I had been avidly obeying via the pages of Creem from 1974 on, at least until I found a Jersey drugstore that sold The Village Voice. There was also the matter of the band's name, which to me was redolent of Surrealism and French cinema, two of my major enthusiasms at the time. So having found this sort-of major label debut (the record was on Blank, a "New Wave" offshoot of Mercury contrived by Cliff Burnstein, later a cofounder of the very heavy management firm Q Prime) in the racks of a Sam Goody's either in the Rockaway Townsquare Mall or Garden State Plaza, I don't remember which, I was extremely eager to get an earful of its sound, which the aforementioned album artwork and minimal sleeve notes (band members' names in alphabetical order, no listing of instruments played or by whom) gave very little clue about. Pretty much no sooner did the needle lock into the groove than I was greeted with a high-pitched electronic shriek, implacable in its insistence, not coming up right into your face per se but calmly, inasmuch as it could be calm, asserting itself as a fact, the same way your dentist's drill does. Alongside the shriek was a semi-mechanical sounding tapping or clicking. And for several seconds it's just that—the shriek and the tapping. And it seems, the first time you hear it, like an eternity. 

In fact it is only about three seconds before the electric bass guitar comes in, plucking bent doubled notes that just hang there before the electric guitar comes in with a kind of mutant Chuck Berry chording and then the whole band kicks in and chugs away—the shriek having dropped out—on the monumental riff of what is "Non-alignment Pact." All right then—rock and roll! Only then the singer starts in, with the shriek returning to buttress his fat-toned near-hysterical whinging about heads of state and whatnot. Even ignorant of any visual reference for Ubu lead singer David Thomas, he sounds like you'd imagine the grown-up Norman, a.k.a. "Chubsy Ubsy," of Hal Roach's Our Gang shorts, would have had he grown up, done a few substances, nursed a particular emotional petulance, and founded a band. By the end of this particular number, Thomas works himself up into such a frenzy over, one eventually learns from parsing the lyrics, his alienation form the fairer sex, that he actually sounds as if he's barking his frustration. The other people in the house weren't the only ones shuddering at this; I have to admit I did, too. The remainder of side one proved similarly...odd. The title track boasted another killer riff, this one propelled by that least punk-rockish of instruments, an electric piano; but the bizarre radio wave and conversational-snippets noise below its surface, the percussive hammer hitting a railway tie, and finally, the bizarre middle-eight (such as it was) with a noisy push-me/pull-you slide guitar solo by Tom Herman whose halts and returns were so abrupt that I had to inspect the vinyl several times to make sure it wasn't actually skipping; what was that all about? Then the bizarre horn work of the next track blending in with the atonal-seeming "scatting" of the singer; the horn in question, I later learned, was called a "musette" and was played by either...or maybe by both...Thomas or Allen Ravenstine, whose rudimentary, patch-cord operated EML synthesizers were responsible for the shrieks and hiccups and patches of white, white noise that never left the songs alone. It all came to a climax of sorts on the album's second-to-last cut, which seemed to be an extremely well-recorded chronicle of the singer breaking a bunch of glass ashtrays in the studio while drunkenly mouth-farting while the guitarist tried to piece together a lick and the other band members (Tony Maimone and Scott Krauss were the bassist and drummer, respectively) did...stuff. This "song" was entitled "Sentimental Journey." That thing that everybody's parents once said at some point about the rock and roll, e.g., "This isn't music, it's noise?" That pronouncement literally comes true with this particular piece.

Or at least it seemed to at the time. Even given the ostensible extremes of the stuff I'd been scarfing down in the summer and fall of '77—Ramones, Clash, Iggy and the Stooges (Raw Power but not Fun House, which might have given me a clue re Ubu and noise),Richard Hell and the Voidoids—and even given all that Velvet Underground stuff I had gotten into a few years prior to that, there was nothing that could have prepared me for this. As it happens, my memory of my particular circumstances of first hearing this record are a little blurry; I always associate it with my high school years, but the album's release date puts me in what I sometimes laughingly refer to as my second semester of college. I was attending William Paterson College as an English lit major; I had tried to get into SVU, on account of my best friend was gonna go there, but my parents balked at the cost and the fact that I would have to live in the city. They were going through a rather protracted breakup at the time, one that wouldn't become definitive until several years later, speaking of push-me/pull-you, and one of the end results of this that had the most impact on me (aside from the financial insecurity that eventually dictated that I go to a state school within commuting distance) was the fact that I was never entirely sure which "adult" authority figure was going to be living at our house at what time. So I don't precisely recall whether The Modern Dance gave my mother her third or fourth stroke, or if it caused my dad to give me that look that said "What are the genetic circumstances that led to my fathering an extraterrestrial being?" I do know that after the first audit, I tended to play it only when there was nobody else in the house. For in spite of the fact that it actually even weirded me out a little bit, I was kind of obsessed with it. 

I played it for some of my buddies, most of whom were high school pals. We had formed a band in the late spring/early summer of '77, a very suburban quasi-"punk" outfit we called The Bad Taste Delegation. We covered half of side two of The Ramones' Leave Home on the one hand, and Loudon Wainwright III's "Dead Skunk" on the other. Most of its members were talented multi-instrumentalists largely known to the remainder of the student population as "band fags," and they were largely into "real" music, which largely meant Chicago. Our bass player was such a maven that he once won a block of tickets to a Madison Square Garden show by that band by correctly guessing, from the opening chord, the title track of Chicago singer/songwriter Robert Lamm's three-copy-selling solo album Skinny Boy on some FM radio contest. The guys were, how do you say, mildly intrigued by my musical tastes. "This Costello guy's got some pretty good songs," one of their number would allow. And then wonder, "How can this John Cale come up with something as great as 'Mr Wilson,' and then do this other...shit?" And so on. In any event, The Modern Dance in general and "Sentimental Journey" in particular took the cake for these fellows. "You're not going to believe the thing that Kenny's cooked up now..." And hardly anybody really could credit it.

Even today, the record doesn't exactly sound...cozy. "Non-alignment Pact" turns up in the background of a record-store-set scene in the last third of Olivier Assayas' 1986 Disorder, and it's welcome and bracing to hear and it sort of "fits in" with the rest of the New Wave music on the soundtrack (and given the film's storyline, it also evokes the ghost of Peter Laughner, the songwriter/guitarist who was an Ubu founder and who died of alcoholism/acute pancreatitis in 1977 at the age of 24), but it still sounds distinctive, its irritation factor is still there, there's little that's quaint about it. As much as the music cohered for me over months and then years of listening (and to be quite frank, seven times out of ten when I'm revisiting the record at this stage of my life, I will skip "Sentimental Journey"), there is still something a little scary about The Modern Dance. It would be less than a year before Ubu would release its second LP, the even more monumental Dub Housing, as a U.K.-only Chrysalis issue, Blank Records seemingly having imploded in the wake of Modern Dance's release. By that time I had moved out of my family house and into a place in about the poorest part of Paterson, gotten something like a proper girlfriend, purchased and enjoyed Art Bears' Hopes and Fears and Fred Frith's Guitar Solos, among other seminal works, and taken several further steps leading me from childhood into the fierce order of virility. In March of 1979 I would see Ubu live for the first time, on a bill with The Feelies at Hurrah's. That show was where I first would lay eyes on Robert Christgau, who had written of The Modern Dance, "Ubu's music is nowhere near as willful as it sounds at first. Riffs emerge from the cacophony, David Thomas's shrieking suits the heterodox passion of the lyrics, and the synthesizer noise begins to cohere after a while." My buddy Ron and I couldn't believe that my girlfriend Nicole had actually fallen asleep, her head resting on a speaker cabinet, during Ubu's set—but shows went on very late back in that day. By this time the music was making nothing but sense to me. I was beginning to feel as if I had found a place. I was somewhat mistaken, but not entirely.

Comments

[cmasonwells]

Thank you, Glenn. I miss your rock writing!

[Girish]

Wonderful post, Glenn!

[steve mowrey]

One of the iconic "punk" records & Cleveland's finest hour. Thanks for the cool review.

[Phil Freeman]

I interviewed Thomas for a cover story in The Wire a couple of years ago, around the time Pere Ubu released Why I Hate Women, an album with one of the all-time great titles. A fascinating guy, with some really compelling ideas about the role of the rock frontman and about songwriting POV - basically, he doesn't feel at all obligated to present his "real self" onstage or in his lyrics; in his view, he's being paid to be "David Thomas," and "David Thomas" is what you'll get. David Thomas (minus the quotes) is who he is in his off-hours.

[Kent Jones]

Once, when I played Bowie's "A New Career in a New Town" on the family stereo, my grandmother called from the kitchen: "Your record's skipping!" Another time, my mother listened to a few seconds of it, shot me a worried look and asked, "Is that acid rock?"

This is beautiful, GK. DATAPANIK IN THE YEAR ZERO was my first Ubu record (the EP obviously, as opposed to the CD box) and I liked it but wasn't over the moon (that happened later). THE MODERN DANCE had me swooning, as did DUB HOUSING and NEW PICNIC TIME. I think things started to get a little too arch and tightened up with THE ART OF WALKING despite some great moments, and SONG OF THE BAILING MAN always seemed like a David Thomas record instead of Ubu. But I loved TENEMENT YEAR even if they didn't (great tour, with Ravenstine back in the fold and no less than two drummers, Krauss and Chris Cutler - and I LOVED Thomas' trombone solo on "George Had a Hat"). Since then, PENNSYLVANIA's the only one that's grabbed me as a whole album, but they still make mind-expanding music. Truth to tell, I go back to the old records more often than I do to Television or The Clash or even the Heads.

[Phil Freeman]

Dub Housing is my favorite Ubu album. I don't think I ever played it around my mom, though; the only disc of theirs I owned while still living w/parents was the "greatest hits" disc Terminal Tower.

The only music I was forbidden to play around the house was AC/DC, because Brian Johnson's voice drove my mom batshit. She liked Iggy's voice, though, and she was a big Talking Heads fan.

[That Fuzzy Bastard]

Ah, the joys of being the only one in town who likes a record! My generational equivalent: In 1988, I was in high school in flyover country, surrounded by punk rockers whose major musical debate was Dead Kennedys versus The Exploited, and whether Sonic Youth had completely pussied-out with "Sister". And then my dedicated Spin-reading convinced me to buy "It Takes A Nation of Millions". And that record, well, a bunch of punks who loved throwing "Fun House" or "Earth A.D." into the test stereos of the local Fred Meyers just couldn't take it. That repetitive tea-whistle in "Rebel Without A Pause", the looped horn of "Night of the Living Baseheads", the hollow drum sound of "Bring the Noise", not to mention the hectoring, shouting vocals and the noisy but spacious production that seemed miles removed from the fairly rockin' Run-D.M.C. I was in love, and if I'm honest, some of that love was precisely *because* I'd found something that even fans of "Sister Ray" couldn't handle.

[J.M]

Great piece, Glenn! Looking forward to more in the series.

A bit younger than you, I got into Ubu around 1992. I saw them live twice the following year (with Garo Yellin on cello, who tore it up during "30 Seconds Over Tokyo"). Got to say "hi" to Jim Jones in the parking lot at one of the shows, very sweet & gracious seeming guy. His health kept him from touring when I saw the band again 1995 touring for RAY GUN SUITCASE. Tom Herman was back in the band at that point and it was great to see him in action, including an especially intense "My Dark Ages." I love RGS, and PA, too, though I'll admit I haven't re-visited ST. ARKANSAS or WHY I HATE WOMEN too often.

You know about the live downloads at hearpen.com, right?

[Joseph Neff]

This is excellent, Glenn. Back in 1989 a record store clerk in my town started selling big chunks of her vinyl collection, and I picked up the whole run from DATAPANIK through SONG OF THE BAILING MAN for cheap, though it did wipe out a weeks' pay from my part-time gig at Roy Rogers. All I really knew about them at that point was gleaned from Spin and a handful of fanzines. CLOUDLAND came out right around the same time, and while a few friends dug "Waiting For Mary", which received a little late night MTV play during the summer after I graduated high school, all my peers were pretty well perplexed or annoyed when I'd spin those LPs. So I'd listen at home alone in my basement bedroom, or when I moved into a apartment with friends I'd break out the headphones. It was a long time before I met folks who loved old Ubu.

@Fuzzy: Your description of old school rap's power to piss people off mirrors my experience. Its appearence in the suburbs really divided the punks in my region. It was embrace it or virulently hate it, and I once nearly came to blows with a peer who couldn't handle that I dare follow his shitty GBH tape with Schooly D's SMOKE SOME KILL.

[bill]

Sometimes, this blog makes me feel like a big fat moron.

[Escher]

I've been developing a Ramones biopic, with The Banana Splits attached to play The Ramones. We've got Miss Piggy signed on to play Debbie Harry, and Oscar the Grouch in the Hilly Krystal role, and we've been trying to get HR Pufnstuff to play David Thomas.

[John M]

Street Waves. Street Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaves.

[Grant L]

Personally I find "Sentimental Journey" bracing in a very good way, but being that I've long believed goofiness to be a very underrated attribute, I've got a real soft spot for David going off the deep end. I even love the rap about nature, ants and grasshoppers on the version of "Arabia" that mistakenly made it onto LP.

[hamletta]

Like J.M., I'm right behind you. My best friend and I were the punk-rock weirdos in our suburban DC high school (late '70s), but we could never get into Pere Ubu.

Maybe it's a guy thing, like The Three Stooges.

[Paul Duane]

Great post, it evoked powerful memories of lying in bed in a darkened room in the early '80s listening to my bootlegged cassette tape of this record, and David Thomas expressing all my adolescent angst as he chanted and spat "It's home... it's a home, it's a rug, it's a home, it's a window on a - PPPITTTT!!!" (or whatever it was he was saying - that's what I always heard it as).

[Glenn Kenny]

@ Hamletta: The Three Stooges, huh? Wow, that hurts.

I can't really make the same generalization, necessarily. Through the years, the women in my life have either been completely fine with Ubu (e.g. the aforementioned college girlfriend) or...not. My Lovely Wife, for instance, is not a fan, but can be bent a bit. A few years back the reconstituted Rocket From The Tombs was coming to Southpaw in Brooklyn, and my wife balked like crazy at the prospect of going. "But Richard Lloyd's on guitar," I told her. (She's a substantive Television fan, bless her socks.) No dice. As it happened though, her former roommate was going, as was another gal pal, as such are sometimes referred to as. "They really don't sound so much like Ubu as they do the Stooges, only with David Thomas singing," argued the former roommate. "And that's the problem," countered MLW, doing a Spencer Pratt avant le lettre. In any event, she was eventually persuaded (and I see that at the time we had been married a little over a month, talk about pressing one's luck), and she enjoyed herself...with qualifications. And she was compelled to admit that, whatever his limitations as a vocalist, Thomas was/in in fact a genuine PERFORMER. It was a fun evening. New York Times critic Jon Pareles, noting that I seemed to be attending the show with three beautiful women in tow, commented approvingly of my "harem."

[Kent Jones]

My friend Pete started corresponding with David Thomas on matters poetical and we used to hang backstage after the shows. We saw Thomas and Ralph Carney in some tiny club one night. They did an amazing version of "Hooked on Classics" in those days. And I believe that was the night I realized that "Jehovah's Kingdom Comes," one of my favorite Ubu songs, is, or at least was, meant to be taken literally.

[Glenn Kenny]

@ Kent: Verily; many pages, perhaps even an entire blog, could be devoted to the former Crocus Behemoth's pronunciatos and/or denials/protestations thereof concerning denomination. Diamanda Galas had a funny/sad story of her encounter with the man when he was sharing a bill with her while she was performing "Litanies of Satan," and he was perhaps unaware that the piece was an adaptation of Baudelaire and not an actual incantation to the Dark Prince or any such thing. Not that it would have necessarily made a difference...

I sometimes used to entertain a fancy of putting a bunch of recording artists who were also Witnesses in the same room, to wit, David Thomas, Michael Jackson, George Benson. Well, that'll never happen now...

[ATK]

Thankfully I'm still rolling my eyes!!!

[Hollis Lime]

Don't forget Damo Suzuki, Glenn.

[hamletta]

Sorry, man. I was just throwing it out there. And just to prove myself wrong, I'm pretty sure I did meet a woman once who thought the Three Stooges were funny. Can't remember who she was now.

And my stars and garters; Witnesses? If they come to your door, tell them you're Lutheran. I don't know why, but it worked like garlic on Dracula for me. I was only telling the truth, but from what I hear, it's rather odd for JWs to say, "Well! Gotta go now!"

[Mr. Ziffel]

Although I'm not completely familiar with Ubu's work, I can say that "Final Solution" fucking rocks. A friend played it for me a few years back and I couldn't believe it when he told me it was release in, like, 1976. That song (and obviously the band) was WAY ahead of its time.

[Ian W. Hill]

I'm not sure if Mr. Thomas is still a Witness -- when I started seeing Ubu, he was very very precise about not swearing onstage (even refusing to say the title of Wayne Kramer's album LLMF when Kramer played with Ubu at Knitting Factory, after asking Wayne, "Does that stand for a bad word?").

The last few times I've seen him, with Ubu or doing solo poetry, the man has cursed onstage like a sonuvabitch. Maybe the divorce, etc. has changed things.

[Joseph Neff]

I just remembered this...

http://moviemorlocks.com/2008/03/29/x-a-new-approach-to-seeing-and-hearing-the-1963-roger-corman-film/

[Kent Jones]

Mr. Ziffel, a LOT of records fucking rocked in 1976. You have some catching up to do. That year alone: RAMONES, THE ROYAL SCAM, VIVA ROXY MUSIC, LET'S STICK TOGETHER, RADIO ETHIOPIA, JONATHAN RICHMAN AND THE MODERN LOVERS, STATION TO STATION and LOW, RASTAMAN VIBRATION, HOWLIN' WIND and HEAT TREATMENT, BLONDIE, "Street Waves," "So It Goes" and "Heart of the City," and so on.

1977 was even better.

[Mr. Ziffel]

Well, Kent, actually I am familiar with quite a few of those records. I was 12 in 1976, and although I was mostly listening to top ten stuff on CKLW at the time and had no older brothers or sisters, I did indeed know who David Bowie and Steely Dan were. It wasn't until a couple of years later that I was turned on to the Ramones and Blondie, in addition to Iggy, Elvis Costello, the Clash, the B-52s, etc., but better late than never, right? Unfortunately, Pere Ubu wasn't on my radar...I'm sure they played the Detroit area at some time, but I never heard of them until probably sometime in the late eighties when I read about them in Spin or something. My point was that because I AM familiar with many of the sounds of the mid-seventies and after, I was very pleasantly surpised to find that "Final Solution" is this awesome punk/new-wave/industrial hybrid released well before most of those words were used to categorize rock music.

But thanks for the playlist, anyway. I definitely need to listen to some more Graham Parker!

[That Fuzzy Bastard]

Anyone else read "Punk Rock and Trailer Parks", the fun comics memoir by "Derf", about being a young punk rocker in Akron? Pere Ubu doesn't come up, unfortunately, but there's some great stories of hijinks with the Plasmatics, the Clash, Ian Dury, et. al.

[Kent Jones]

Mr. Ziffel, thanks for the clarification. Actually, in my opinion, those two albums are Graham Parker's shining moment. There are some great songs on STICK TO ME and SQUEEZING OUT SPARKS is pretty damn good, but he was at his absolute best right at the beginning, and HOWLIN' WIND is incredible. Great horn charts on both.

[laura]

As one of your kinfolk, I do recall always being rather intrigued by what the heck you were listening to. And also, being a bit shy and a few years younger, I usually observed with curiosity from a safe distance. I will say I have to thank you for exposing me to bands like, The Ramones, The Feelies, Sonic Youth and the aforementioned Pere Ubu, whom I actually saw at Maxwell's many a moon ago and even ran into you there, ironically--- the true fan you are. No eye-rolls here. Just appreciation.